The ever increasing demands of Internet users caused by the introduction of new high bandwidth applications and online services as well as the growing number of users and devices connected to the Internet, bring many challenges for the operators, especially in the last mile section of the network. Next generation access architectures are expected to offer high sustainable bandwidth per user. They also need to support a much larger service areas to decrease number of current central offices and hence potentially save the network expenditures in the future. Obviously, it requires high capacity and low loss transmission and optical fiber technology is the only future proof candidates for broadband access. Although this technology has already been widely deployed in the core networks, it is hard to use the same expensive devices made for core segment to solve the last mile bottlenecks, due to the low number of users sharing the network resources (and deployment cost). Therefore, the next generation optical access (NGOA) networks need to be designed with consideration of cost efficiency in the first place.   Network reliability is also turning to be an important aspect for the NGOA networks as a consequence of long reach, high client count and new services requiring uninterrupted access. Consequently, new architectures not only need to be cost efficient but also they should fulfill the increasing reliability requirements.   Although several NGOA alternatives have been proposed in the literatures, there is not yet an agreement on a single architecture. As described earlier, network expenditure and reliability performance are the two main factors to be considered. Therefore, this thesis concentrates on finding a suitable alternative for future broadband access by evaluating the reliability performance and total cost of ownership for several NGOA candidates. In particular, in this thesis we analyze the tradeoff between the cost needed to deploy backup resources and the reliability performance improvement obtained by the provided survivability mechanism.   First, we identified the suitable NGOA candidates by comparing two main groups of optical access networks, namely passive optical networks (PONs) and active optical networks (AONs), in terms of cost, reliability performance and power consumption. The initial results have shown that wavelength division multiplexing PON (WDM PON) is the most promising alternative for the NGOA networks because of its high potential capacity, low cost and power consumption. So we continued our studies by investigating two WDM-based PON architectures regarding their cost and reliability performance. The study has also included a proposed fiber layout compatible with these two candidates aiming to minimize the required investment needed to offer protection. Our primary results confirmed that hybrid PON (HPON) is the best alternative for the NGOA networks. Therefore we further analyzed this candidate considering several variants of HPON. The most important components and sections of the HPON, which need to be protected to decrease the impact of each failure in the network have been identified. Based on these outcomes, two resilience architectures protecting the shared part of the HPON were proposed and their reliability performance parameters as well as cost of protection were evaluated. According to the results, using our proposed protection schemes a considerable improvement in reliability performance of the HPON variants can be provided at minor extra investment. We also introduced a cost efficient HPON architecture with different levels of protection for users with various reliability requirements, i.e. the protection of shared parts of the access network for all the connected users and end-to-end resilience scheme for some selected ones (e.g., business users). To gain an overall view on the cost efficiency of the proposed architecture, we evaluated the investment required for deploying these schemes considering several network upgrading paths towards a protected network. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis investigating the influence of network deployments time and the density of the users with higher availability requirements was presented.   In summary, we have shown that HPON is able to fulfill the main NGOA requirements such as high bandwidth per-user, large coverage and client count. The work carried out in the thesis has proved that HPON can also offer high reliability performance while keeping the network expenditures at an acceptable level. Moreover, low power consumption and high flexibility in resource allocation of this architecture, makes it a winning candidate for the NGOA networks. Therefore, HPON is a promising architecture to be deployed as NGOA network in the near future considering the fact that components are soon to be available in the market. / <p>QC 20130530</p> / FP7 EU project, Optical Access Seamless Evolution(OASE)

By 2020 there will be 50 billion connected devices over the Internet. With the fast-increasing data traffic demand in both fixed and mobile networks, network operators need to migrate networks towards next generation solutions. The network migration requires the enormous investment in equipment and infrastructure, while the revenues are not expected to grow significantly. Therefore, one of the main challenges for network operators is to find out a proper cost-effective optical network solution that can match future high capacity demand and flexibly support multiple network services on a common network infrastructure. The first part of the thesis addresses the Active Optical Network (AON) and its migration strategies towards Next Generation Optical Access (NGOA) solutions. Several migration strategies are proposed from the perspective of network topology, data plane and control plane. A general methodology for Techno-Economic analysis has been developed and applied to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculation of different NGOA solutions. The thesis provides a complete cost evaluation of AON migration paths, which can be used by network operators to assess the economic feasibility of network migration. A converged Optical Transport Network (OTN) that can serve both fixed and mobile network services is beneficial from the cost-saving perspective. However, the different types of services, require different network performance. The second part of the thesis focuses on the investigation of the converged OTN that can be flexibly and timely adjusted to satisfy varying service conditions. A programmable OTN featured with Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) in the data plane and Software Defined Networking (SDN) in control plane has been proposed. To demonstrate the benefits of the converged OTN, the thesis also provides a multi-domain orchestration architecture for the multiple network services.  The resource orchestration, across three network domains: OTN, mobile network and cloud, enables agile service creation and optimized resource allocation among the multiple domains. / <p>QC 20170512</p>

[pt] Para suportar os requisitos das redes móveis de 5a geração (5G), os sistemas de comunicação óptica serão usados nas redes de acesso. Isso ocorre porque a evolução das RAN (Radio Access Networks) incluem a centralização do equipamento mais crítico para implantar pontos de acesso móveis de baixa potência, como DAS (Distributed Antenna Systems) e Small Cells. Os serviços emergentes solicitam a implantação de tecnologias de rádio sobre fibra com ênfase na eficiência de largura de banda, eficiência energética e alta confiabilidade. Neste âmbito, um monitoramento eficiente da camada física é imperativo para a operação dessas redes. O sistema de monitoramento deve fornecer uma localização de falhas em serviço, econômico, centralizado e com impacto mínimo para a transmissão de dados. Esta tese propõe vários sistemas de monitoramento incorporado no transceptor utilizando reflectometria óptica no domínio do tempo. Os sistemas de monitoramento são testados em diferentes sistemas de transmissão de dados e arquiteturas de rede, onde é apresentada uma validação simulada e outras experimentais. / [en] In order to support the requirements for 5th generation mobile networks (5G), optical communication systems will be used in the access part of the network. This is because the evolution of radio access networks includes the centralization of the most critical equipment in order to deploy low power mobile access points, like distributed antenna systems and small cells. The emerging services call for the deployment of radio over fibre technologies with emphasis on bandwidth efficiency, energy efficiency and high reliability. Within this scope, an efficient monitoring of the physical layer would become essential for the operation of these networks. The monitoring system should provide in-service, cost efficient and centralized fault localization with minimum impact on data transmission. This thesis proposes several transceiver-embedded optical time domain reflectometry monitoring systems. The monitoring systems are tested over different data transmission systems and network architectures, where one architecture was simulated and several others experimentally validated.